It does seem as if the only way out of this madness, IS free college, but free online college.

Online and free for those that want free => no need for dorms, cafeterias, 75% of the admins, or even the football teams.

Just the classes they need to graduate.

Put a cap on student loans (based on median starting salary?).

There are truly excellent courses at Coursera.

The problem is, for example, if you want to, say, get certified as a psychologist, you can't be me -- somebody who could likely just take the EPPP test and pass, after decades of study. I just looked at the practice questions this morning, per a James Coyne post on reproducibility in psychology.

https://jcoynester.wordpress.com/2016/05/14/how-competition-between-aps-and-apa-for-prestige-fueled-the-crisis-of-reproducibility-in-psychology/?utm_content=buffer68888&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

California, at least, has state licensing requirements that require you to have taken classes in signs of children being abused, etc.

I didn't want to get a Ph.D., because it requires narrowcasting and expensive schooling for years. But often, people -- especially journalists -- don't take me as seriously because I don't have one. Hoping the science in this book I'm writing changes that.

I'm glad you mentioned the admins. I have less complaint about improvements to the dorms than the addition of a huge number of admins commanding lordly salaries.

A $56 million dollar renovation to a 560-bed dorm, amounts to a $100,000 per person.

Moreover, we assume that this renovation is going to last for at least a few years. They're not going to do 56 million dollar reservations to the dorm every year. Assume it lasts even 5 years before they have to spend that kind of money again, and that's 20,000 per student.

Of course, I haven't factored in the maintenance and upkeep of the dorms during that time. Always a few drunks who have to commit acts of vandalism, costing some unnecessary repairs.

And complain about it all you want. At least it's money spent on the students.

A 221% increase in the number of admins is a bit harder to understand, especially in light of how much admins are overpaid.

And that's money that will be spent on them every year.

If I were to blog about this (and I deleted my Tumblr, so I have nothing that even remotely resembles a blog), I would have opened with the part about admins.

"It looks like a hotel . . ."

This is true all over the US. The college I went to we all lived in older buildings that they called "dorms." They sucked.

Just a couple of years ago I worked with a woman who was a recent graduate of my old school - listening to her stories of dorm life for her made me realize that even though it was the same school our experiences are worlds apart.

Just for example; I shared one large room with three other guys. We had bunk beds. There was a bathroom down the hall for the whole floor. (The dorm floors were segregated by gender - boy, would they have a field day with the "unfairness" of that today!) There was a TV lounge on the first floor.

My co-worker had a room which consisted of two bedrooms that shared a sitting/study room that had cable. (okay, to be fair, some of their school work really did require the internet which came with the cable; but, still, they had cable in their dorm room!) They each had their own private bedroom! Further, their room had a bathroom that only the two of them shared. And, or crying out loud - they had a maid come in once a week to clean their bathroom!

Part of the reason for this is that the baby boomers were a huge generation that expanded colleges; now with smaller numbers attending colleges are trying harder to attract the limited numbers enrolling - and fancy dorms are one way to do that.

Bob, I agree; maybe limiting college loans to what the job market might pay is a good idea. I would even suggest that it be tied to major as well. Say, for example, if you want to get an engineering degree and there is a good employee market for engineers then loans are available. If there isn't much work for museum curators than there isn't much loan money available for that Art History degree.

New Jersey runs something like this for unemployment. If you are unemployed, and do not have a college degree, the state will pay for job training. Now, it isn't for anything very expensive such as a college degree. But, they do pay (not a loan!) for things such as getting a CDL or other things. But, they change from year to year what they will pay for, based upon the job market.

A couple of years ago, my neighbor was allowed to take a couple of courses at the local community college so that she could learn more about Excel. Not much, but it helped her land another job. A good friend of mine, out of work for several months, got his CDL by the state unemployment paying for the driver training.

Just handing out student loans doesn't seem to be keeping college costs down; it fact, the more loan money available the higher college costs go.

> Put a cap on student loans

Make schools co-sign. (Iowahawk)

College is so expensive because there's so much free money in the system.

When i worked in student loans, the big issue was proprietary trade schools that promised students training in a trade, but delivered inadequate training. The schools usually lasted a year or two and then shut down in bankruptcy. The owners would then open a new school and game the system again.

Since the schools got to keep a prorated portion of the loan if a student dropped out and got to charge a processing fee against the loan if the student dropped out, the downside to the schools was minimal.

The tuition was always exactly the maximum amount per semester for a student loan. This despite the fact that student loans were originally intended to cover books, tuition, and some living expenses.

The application for these schools always included a student loan application with the box "disburse all funds to the school" pre-checked.

These schools were eligible for student loans thanks to Edward Kennedy's legislation to expand the system to less traditional colleges in order to help the poor who couldn't go to Harvard.

Public colleges got hip to what the proprietary trade schools were doing and raised their tuition to cash in on the free money.

Take the free money out of the system and you'll reduce the opportunities for graft.

A cap on student loans won't do it because the schools will take everything you give them. Eventually tuition will rise anyway and students will complain to Congress that they can't afford school anymore, so the student loan amount will be increased.

It used to be that once a school reached a certain default rate, it was declared ineligible for the program. Ted Kennedy got rid of that safeguard as well.

Making schools responsible, at least partly, for defaults may provide them some impetus to be selective, but mostly it will motivate them to raise tuition enough so they can create a hedge fund against default expenses, which will inevitably, and ironically, be funded with student loan monies.

The trick is to stop giving schools a free-money fund. Make them compete for students on real education and affordability. Let the Ivies of the word fund their own diversity and economic charity students instead of patting themselves on the back for their taxpayer-funded generosity and benevolence.

Check this out -- voting while In a coma:

Texas Voters Approve Bond Issue That Includes A High School's $63 Million Football Stadium.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2016/05/11/a-texas-high-schools-planned-63-million-football-stadium-thats-an-800-lbs-gorilla/#5848b953b37f

And I think Iowahawk's notion is a great one.

I didn't want to get a Ph.D., because it requires narrowcasting and expensive schooling for years. But often, people -- especially journalists -- don't take me as seriously because I don't have one. Hoping the science in this book I'm writing changes that.

I hope so too. The quality of the work should stand (or fall) on its own

The easy solution is to get government and banks out of the college loan process. Universities give loans to students.
The ridiculous fees/tuition and worthless degrees will become a self solving problem.
When most getting a art historian degree, or gender studies degree can't find jobs and pay back loans, universities will stop offering those degrees.

You don't even have to get the banks out Joe J. Too many defaults because people can't find a job that pays enough and the bank goes out of business. Only government can afford to fail so spectacularly.

Get rid of the gov't backing of the bad loans and banks will either not loan out to students, or will package the bad loans and sell them off like the mortgages.

"You don't even have to get the banks out Joe J. "

Back before the government started guaranteeing all student loans, this wasn't much of a problem. You could get a loan from a bank, but you had to demonstrate to them that you were good enough to graduate, and that your chosen field of study would make you enough money to repay the loan. It was when the government took over the loan process that we saw the explosion in humanities degrees coupled with the de-valuing of the humanities education.

"Get rid of the gov't backing of the bad loans and banks will either not loan out to students, or will package the bad loans and sell them off like the mortgages."

As long as they aren't selling them to the government or being forced by the government to offer them I could care less. Eventually the idiots who buy them will run out of money. Just don't bail the idiots out because their friends run the government.

Even as the myopic Hanna Rosins of the world smugly cackle about women's domination of post-secondary education, one must quietly snigger at the fact that it is these legions of "well-educated" SJW, feminist co-eds who are disproportionately burdened with this mountain of untenable debt.

That this is primarily a female problem is even more apparent when one considers that the STEM subjects, which are a good investment and will more readily allow repayment, are still heavily dominated by the boys. The other majors? Well, learning about how the nasty white menz have kept the wimminz and everybodyz else down and made such big badzfeelz might be useful to some private employer, somewhere -- but apparently not so much. Oh, wellz ...

So, will there be a (primarily male) taxpayer-funded bailout of student debt? Can you say, "Damsels in Distress"? Yes, Virginia, a bear does shit in the woods, and Big Daddy Government will certainly come to the rescue of all the "strong, independent" wyminz.